An increasing danger of our connected, digital world is the rise of hackers, and their potential to inflict serious damage with real-world consequences.

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Nothing is precious for us than our data, and protecting that data at all costs is going to be paramount going forward. Good thing IBM has already perfected a full-proof system to foil the attempts of 21st century hackers!

IBM just released its latest Z series mainframe last month, the z14. What’s a mainframe I hear you ask? Well, it’s a very powerful computer which is used to handle huge volumes of data transactions — for e.g. in a bank scenario, or for a flight booking website, or an ecommerce platform, among other things.

This is what the new IBM Z14 mainframe looks like

IBM’s mainframes are widely used in the tech industry for delivery of critical services, but what the company has done for the first time ever with the newly released z14 mainframe is to allowdata encryption at every level of the system, and then storing everything inside encrypted containers. Multiple levels of encryption to hoodwink even the most diligent hackers out there.

And on top of that, if the system detects an attack like malware or other intrusion, the z14 mainframe has been designed to shut itself down automatically, as per an IBM statement on Techcrunch. Even if hackers could somehow get through all of these defenses, which is highly unlikely, the multiple levels of encryption would still render the data useless.

According to a report published in The Hindu, IBM’s India engineering team had a crucial role in the successful development of the z14 mainframe’s “pervasive encryption” technology.

The report quoted Gururaj S Rao, IBM Fellow & VP of System Integration, IBM zSystems as suggesting that a key z14 mainframe component designed by the India team was the encryption unit, which gives the z14 mainframe its unparalleled level of security. More than 100 engineers from IBM’s India business unit contributed towards the development of the z14 mainframe.

Hopefully, the adoption and deployment of z14’s pervasive encryption technology will cause a major dent in the exploits of hackers in the coming months and years. And we’ll know that India had an important role in the scheme of things!